OpenBSD & AMD64 (Updated)

Hi.

I think downgrade to i386 have several limitations, mainly the memory support.
Now, this is part of the growing process of the Operating System, great hardware such DELL server sometimes don't work fine with OpenBSD, I had the same problem running NetBSD a moths ago.

But, I think this is good have bug reports to OpenBSD developers, maybe in the near future have a solid amd64 version on it.  Good luck, I'm logged now.

I've been running snapshots for a few months now.  Don't know if this will be helpful to you but I've been working on a shell script to help me with upgrades.

I just put the script in my home directory http://devio.us/~barry/snap_upgrade.sh

It works like this:

Download an installxx.iso snapshot from your mirror.
Run the script, the script does this:
  mounts the installxx.iso on /mnt using vnconfig
  removes /x.x if it exists
  copies /mnt/x.x to /x.x
  copies /x.x/{arch}/bsd.rd to /bsd.rd
  cleans up after itself
Reboot and type "boot bsd.rd" at the boot> prompt.
Select the "Upgrade" option.
For "Location of sets?" type "disk"

After the Upgrade remember to use sysmerge(8) and
update packages with: pkg_add -ui -F update -F updatedepends

References:
sysmerge(8)
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#MountImage
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade47.html
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/current.html
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Install

Thank you everyone for your comments regarding this. After all, we're in this together.

I just looked over the script and that would certainly speed the upgrade process up.

We'll announce today when we will be performing the upgrade to 4.7-current.

Upgrading to 4.7-current amd64 takes much less work than downgrading to i386, so we might as well do that first.

Daniel, could be more specific about the problems with the amd64 platform? and Barry thanks for the script!

I'm working on the script again today.
Beware, the one I uploaded yesterday had a critical line commented out.
Line 58:    #sudo cp -R /${ISO_REL_R}/${ARCH}/bsd.rd /

That line (obviously) copies the new bsd.rd to /
hmm... that may be why I got all those "bad checksum" errors last night.  I must have been using a bsd.rd from last time I upgraded...

bmeigs:

Yeah, I just uploaded what I've been working on today, it's in my ~/public_html, get it here:

http://devio.us/~barry/snap_upgrade.sh

Warning: I haven't tested the changes yet, so it's pretty much just for reference at the moment.
I'll probably move it from that location once I get a webpage made to describe it.

Later.

From what we understood, this is not due to having any specific feature enabled. It's something related to how memory management is handled on OpenBSD.

Barry, good job - the script looks great.

As far as documentation - I think the script is quite self-explanatory and if someone can't follow it, they probably shouldn't be upgrading between releases by themselves.

As far as some suggestions - you could probably expand on how it determines whether it should install the mp or sp kernel; there's some that probably run custom compiled kernels under diff names.  Maybe something that checks how many cpu's the system has? For example:

if [ `sysctl -n hw.ncpu` -gt 1 ];
then
  ...
else
  ... 
fi

In either case, I'd like to move this post to 'sysadmin' section on the forum.